Holistic SEO: Fact or Fiction?

Mordy Oberstein:

It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha Mahalo for joining us on the SERPs' Up podcast. We're putting out some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, the head of SEO Brand here at Wix, and I'm joined by the quite well-rounded head of SEO Communications here at Wix, Crystal Carter.

Crystal Carter:

Hello. Thank you for joining us on the podcast.

Mordy Oberstein:

You are like a liberal arts degree. First like a, yes. Your enthusiasm is contagious.

Crystal Carter:

Thank you.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah. Okay. I wanted to mention something because a day before we're recording this episode, we recorded a version of It's New with Barry Schwartz. If you haven't checked that out, check that out on the Wix SEO Hub. It's right there at the top. It's our daily or mostly daily, daily news dive with Barry Schwartz. We kind of spend, you know,  5, 6, 7 minutes going through that day's SEO news. So if you want to catch up on the SEO News, catch up with that each and every day. Except for Fridays, we don't do it on Fridays. And Barry's like--

Crystal Carter:

Oh, he has a whole roundup.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yes, because he has a whole full roundup on Fridays, so you could check that out on Fridays if you really like Jonesing for SEO news. But Barry said, "Every week you guys say it's the new wave of SEO," but you've been doing the podcast for a year and a half. How new is it?

Crystal Carter:

It's pretty new.

Mordy Oberstein:

And apparently for Barry, unless it's immediately new, it's not new.

Crystal Carter:

But these are the standards we've come to expect from Barry. He tells me all the time. I'm like, "Hey, I saw this. This is new." And he's like, "Not new."

Mordy Oberstein:

Could you imagine his wife gives him a gift for his birthday and says, "Oh, Barry, where's that new shirt I gave you yesterday?" "What new shirt? That's not new, you gave to me yesterday."

Crystal Carter:

Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh. Not new.

Mordy Oberstein:

Not new.

Crystal Carter:

Not new, not new.

Mordy Oberstein:

Not new.

Crystal Carter:

I've seen this before. I've seen shirts with buttons. Thank you.

Mordy Oberstein:

Got completely off the rails. We're barely into the podcast. This SERP's Up podcast is brought to you by Wix, where you can only subscribe to your monthly newsletter Searchlight over at wix.com/SEO/learn/newsletter. But where you can also track rank on Google, Bing, and YouTube, and even Amazon without ever leaving the Wix platform with RankiX. Look for the RankiX app inside of the Wix App Market and start tracking your rank performance a bit more holistically. As today we're taking a holistic look at SEO or a look at holistic SEO by covering topics such as, what the heck is holistic SEO? And why does having a holistic approach to SEO even matter?

We're understanding the ecosystem comes into quote-unquote, "Holistic SEO," and is holistic SEO more tactical or is it more strategic? To help us make the holistic connection, Manick Bhan of LinkGraph joins us to answer if you can focus on ranking factors and be holistic in your SEO all at the same time, plus Crystal and I will take a holistic look at how users use Google and what that might mean for the search engine. And of course we have your snappiest of SEO news, and who you should be following on social media for more SEO awesomeness. Because SEO is like bread. Sure, you can have a slice, but why have a slice when you can have the entire loaf as episode 88 of the Serp's Up podcast helps you bake up a broad bakery of holistic SEO goodies.

Crystal Carter:

With whole meal SEO grains.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah.

Mordy Oberstein:

You can focus on one slice of the SEO loaf or you can look at the entire loaf when you're doing your SEO and just eat the loaf.

Crystal Carter:

I have eaten a whole loaf of bread before. This is why I don't have a bread maker. Basically bread maker cooks all night, smells delicious, and then in the morning you're like, "I want the bread." And then you eat it all. And then you still have to go and buy bread even though you had a bread maker make the bread.

Mordy Oberstein:

Some people will take a bottle of beer put it into a bag and go on the street corner, have a beer? I've eaten loaves of bread on the street corner before.

Crystal Carter:

Do you know I did that with Yana from our team, from the SEO team? Shout out to Yana. And some delicious rye with caraway seeds bread. Absolutely gorgeous. Also had dill in it.  Anyway. Anyway. Anyway.

Mordy Oberstein:

Holistic SEO.

Crystal Carter:

Enough about carbs. So yeah, holistic SEO is interesting. It's something that people don't always quantify, but a lot of people do. A lot of people who are very good SEOs will do. And essentially, holistic SEO is what it sounds like. It's thinking about SEO, not from just the tactical point of view, but from a holistic perspective. So you will of course think about your on-page stuff. You'll also think about your technical SEO. You'll also think about your content SEO, but you'll also think about how all of that SEO feeds into the overall practice of your business, the overall practice for your brand and the overall way that people discover your content. One of the things that I'm finding really interesting when I was speaking to people, I was speaking to Jay Cowell from Launch, and she's an agency owner and she was talking about from a paid perspective, they do paid media, but one of the things she was saying is she was saying, "We are platform-agnostic. We are looking to help people to accelerate their discovery whatever platform they need, in whichever way is most advantageous for them to connect with customers."

And I think that there's a lot of people who are moving towards that in terms of search as well. I'm going to quote Arish quoting myself, which is basically like we should be optimizing for user discovery, not just on Google, not just on Bing, but if your users are on TikTok, if your users are on Instagram, if your users are on some forum somewhere, then we should be thinking about SEO that supports all of that from a holistic point of view, both with the strategies that we have, but also with which KPIs we're tracking and how we understand how it fits into the wider ecosystem of the site. Because the way that users use the internet is holistically, users aren't on a single platform when they're looking for information, users are bouncing around from different things.

So if you get a topic that you're interested in, and I certainly do this, if I decide that I'm going to update my garden, for instance, I'm going to look at some videos on Instagram, I'm going to check out some pictures on Pinterest, I'm going to go and get some top tips from YouTube, I'm going to read some blogs that talk about how to do composting or whatever it may be. So I'm going to go around to lots of different channels. And if you have holistic approach to SEO, then you're going to be better prepared for users who are using the web in that way, and you are going to become much more of an authority. Because if they see you in all of those platforms for instance, then that's going to really solidify your brand for them. And if you were able to back that up with solid SEO, that's going to get you some great results.

Mordy Oberstein:

So I want to talk more about that brand point, but I want to talk about more on the dynamic segment. So I have many thoughts about that and I want to talk about that later so I'm not ignoring that. But the way you're describing it where people will look at other channels and they'll think about their SEO more holistically, I think that's one of the things that makes it a little more complicated to define holistic SEO because you can look at holistic SEO from that point of view. You can look at a holistic SEO from, okay, I'm going to think about the algorithm more holistically, which is where I think you get a lot of the EAT conversation coming into it and where Google's headed directionally and SEO concepts.

That's what makes this a little bit tricky, because holistic SEO can mean a lot of different things to a lot of people. But I a million percent agree with what you said before, that a lot of the better SEOs are the ones who are thinking more holistically, whether it be about growth from a platform point of view of how SEO ties into other platforms, or how SEO or how rather growth is tied to thinking about Google a little bit more conceptually and having more SEO concepts that are driving you versus pure SEO checklist things that are driving you.

Crystal Carter:

Right. And I think that's really interesting that you bring up the algorithm because I think the algorithm is more holistic. So when we're talking about the helpful content, when we're talking about EEAT, when we're talking about Google understanding and connecting entities, the algorithm is more holistic than it used to be. It used to be that you could update certain parts of your metadata and you could add the keywords and on all of that sort of stuff, but Google is understanding more the richness of the network of information that you are creating online, including the people who are creating it, including the content you're creating.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, that's such a great point because even on the social side, you’re saying, okay, I want to talk about the overlap and I'll think holistically about the overlap of SEO and social media. So a lot of the times we'll talk about, oh, social media will help you get links and that'll help you do SEO. Even on that side, you could think a little bit more holistically about it. I like to talk about it in terms of your digital light. Google's a moth, Google goes to whoever's the biggest digital light. And if people are talking about your brand either through branded searches or talking about your brand on social media, I feel like all of that factors into your digital light without the direct link factor.

And at the same time, in terms of the algorithm, agree with that also a gazillion percent. If you think about the algorithm in terms of, okay, I see Google doing X and Google doing Y, and I'm going to try to optimize for X and for Y, that's one approach. A more holistic approach would be like I saw Google doing X, conceptually speaking or thematically speaking, what does that mean about the algorithm? What is the algorithm trying to achieve there? What concept is it trying to drive at? Because you're right, and we talked about this before, which podcasts, many podcasts, that Google's trying to really understand and simulate a quality experience for the user with a machine.

So yes, Google is a machine, but trying to simulate what a quality experience might actually look like for the user. So it's going to naturally be a little bit more holistic in how it's approaching quality, relevant results on the SERP. And what a holistic SEO will do is say, "I saw Google try to do X with it. It demoted this webpage, it promoted that webpage. I can maybe see why it might have done that. What can I extrapolate out of that?"

Crystal Carter:

Right, right. And you're essentially looking at overall content and information, understanding trends and how Google is getting better at understanding information and how Google is using its various different tools including machine learning systems like BERT, like MUM, like “ELMO” even, all of these different things. So how they're using all of those tools and how they're layering all those tools, I think it's... I've spoken a bit at a few different events about how people say, "Oh, AI is coming to Search." AI's been in Search, and Google layers all of those AI tools on top of each other. So they have Lens and Lens is also layered with Translate, which is also layered with Search, which is also layered with their weight of understanding natural language processing and things like that. So they're layering all of these things-

Mordy Oberstein:

It's like an onion.

Crystal Carter:

With lots of layers. And so they're layering all of this information. And they're also layering the information that they have about your website. We've talked on this podcast about how you can check learn more about this domain. So there's information on the SERP that will tell you what Google knows about the domain. How old it is, what people are saying about it on Wikipedia, what the brand says about themselves, things like that. Google is taking a very holistic approach to this. If you look at the way they approach Google Business Profile, for instance, they look at the reviews, they look at your attributes, they look at your website, look at your images, they're looking at all of these different things.

So you can't just expect that you can just put keywords on a page and just update the technical SEO and you will get great results. You can't just expect to just do that, it's not... Doing one particular tactic at a time doesn't necessarily move the needle, you need to think about... And of course, I'm not saying don't do those tactics, but don't do them in a silo. They should be as part of your overall approach to being online. And if they're finding that your website is solid, but your Facebook is never updated or has this consistent, inconsistent information, or your Google Business Profile says opening hours that you haven't had since 1997 and lots of different... I don't know, lots of different things in you. They're finding lots of inconsistencies. Then what Google learns to find about you is that you're inconsistent. Right?

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah.

Crystal Carter:

And if you don't want that, then you need to think about all of the different touch points that Google has with your website because they will also reflect all the different touch points that you have with your customers overall. And that is a holistic approach.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah. And that's interesting about this because what you're basically saying, if I'm hearing what you're saying correctly, is like think... Take a look what Google's doing, all the things they're doing in Google Business Profile, all the things they doing over here, and all things over there. And directionally speaking, what does that tell you about what Google's trying to do? Which by the way, we've been doing on this podcast. Ever so subtly, we've been advocating for a more holistic approach. We have a segment, which I think we're doing later, we called Going Going Google, where we're trying to offer directional approach to where Google is directionally heading because we are big advocates for holistic SEO.

And that's one of the reasons why some people will say when someone goes on X or whatever and says, "Hey Barry, I found a new line on the SERP. Is it new that?" That's SEO voyeurism? I say no. I say you can learn a lot about that. Especially back in the day, there was a point in time of the good old days where Google was making tons of endless changes. Most of Barry's stories... That's hyperbolic. A lot of Barry's stories on seoroundtable.com were about, "Someone spotted this, someone spotted that" way more than it even is now.

And you could really see like, wow, there's a real focus on local at that time. And then you could see the switch. Now all of the changes Google's making are e-comm side, all the testing. It's all e-comm. What does that tell you about what Google's trying to do? You can learn a lot by seeing what Google is doing, the products they're releasing, the changes that they're making, the things that they're testing. You can learn a lot about where they're trying to head. And that as an SEO is invaluable information.

Crystal Carter:

Right. Another great place to look at is schema markup. So if you are seeing that Google is... Google in the last year or so has released a lot more rich results schema markup guidance, and that can tell you a lot about what they're doing. Similarly, in Google Search Console, they've added some more dedicated features for certain things. So for instance, they added in video pages, which tells you that they're interested in video. They added in discussion forums schema markup, and profile page markup for instance, which also tells you that they're interested in that.

Additionally, when you look at that, you can also see some of the designations. So for instance, if you look in your schema markup, and if you need to know what schema markup is, I have a fantastic article in the Wix SEO Hub, please go and look it up. Essentially when you look at that, you can see they have properties and they have different properties and elements and things that you can add into your schema markup, and they will have recommendations. They'll say, "You should say who made this picture. You should say who the author is. You should say the reviews. So if this has reviews." And that's telling you if you don't have reviews on your page, guess what? Guess what? That's your hint. That this product should have reviews. That's your hint that Google's interested in reviews for this product.

If you're seeing that, "Oh, they've offered profile pages" and you don't have profile pages on your site, then maybe you should consider profile pages for your site. So there's things that you can see from there. And also schemamarkup.org or Schema.org has a great collection of all the different schema types, and sometimes people find it overwhelming because it's a very ugly website. I find it delightfully ugly, personally. I just love how simple it is. It's pretty much just a spreadsheet, I love that. And basically what it will say... For instance, if you look up a amusement park markup, it will give you lots of the different elements that you could possibly include in amusement park markup. If you were making a page about amusement parks, that would give you a lot of guidance of what should be on their page. It's essentially like a content brief.

And I think that that... And that also schema for instance, as a template for a holistic approach, also has all of the connections and all the different things that it's connected to. So is part of this, is related to that, has an alumni of this, is blah blah blah, has all of those sorts of things. And can guide you with some of these elements. So I think with holistic SEO, particularly if you are feeling a little bit overwhelmed maybe, and you're like, "I don't know where to start," what I generally find it's... My general approach to lots of things is lean into the thing you're most comfortable with first and use that to guide how you build on other things.

So I really like schema for instance, so Schema.org would be a really good place for me to lean into what are the holistic things that I could think about around that topic? Google Business Profile, if you're in the local space is another good one to tell you the kinds of things that Google expects to know about a local business, whether it's... You can say that it's female-led or you can say that it has wheelchair access or you can say that your opening hours, you can have your menu. This is guiding you for the kinds of things that Google is expecting to see from you from a lot of different angles. And it can also guide where you should expect to see yourself on different websites. Maybe you should have yourself on other websites and have similar attributes, so where TripAdvisor or things like that, but in places where they have reviews. So lean into something that you feel comfortable with, and you said, as the springboard to guide you on your holistic SEO journey.

Mordy Oberstein:

Just sum this up before we get to our esteemed guest. If you want to sum up, you’re talking about structured markup and looking where Google's going. Directionally, you just want a concrete example of what this might actually look like. When Google announced they are supporting new structured data markup for forums, Aleyda Solís said, "I take that as a signal of Google looking to reward forum content." So she created chat.seofomo.co, forum for SEO. Lo and behold, what did Google start doing soon thereafter? Started ranking Reddit all over the place. That's somebody who saw what's happening, saw what Google announced, looked at the ecosystem and made an SEO strategy decision based off of that.

Crystal Carter:

Right. And that builds on her brand, builds on the relationship with her audience, includes... And has lots and lots and multiple benefits. It has a tactical approach, but it also has an overall strategic approach, which is great.

Mordy Oberstein:

I thought it was absolutely, absolutely brilliant on Aleyda's part because Aleyda is absolutely brilliant.

Crystal Carter:

Just brilliant.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yes. Okay, with this, let's take a step back and see how SEO is getting started or SEO enthusiast trying to up their game can holistically look at Google ranking factors. Here's Manick Bhan, the founder of LinkGraph on just that.

Manick Bhan:

What does taking a holistic approach to SEO mean when considering ranking factors? Google's ranking factors use thousands of signals when promoting web pages. If you really want to conquer SEO and deliver results for your business, the best thing to do is to memorize those thousands of signals, track them all as they change, and then improve every single one of those signals on your website as soon as possible. Just kidding, who's got time for that? Nobody. SEOs don't have time for that. Plus Google updates its algorithm something like 500 to 600 times per year, so by the time we list out every ranking factor, we have to start over. But as an SEO, I have actually spent a lot of time studying algorithm updates, reading Google's patents, running correlation analyses, and building SEO software. Google's search factors are very sophisticated, but they're also very predictable. SEO is math, not magic. It's built on computer algorithms. All of those thousands of signals really come down to just four main pillars or what I call holistic SEO.

The first pillar of SEO is authority. How authoritative is your website? Google determines authority through factors like backlinks, citations, and what those backlinks say about the websites they're pointing to through anchor text and annotation text. Authority is also communicated through signals like branded searches and brand mentions. Factors like this, what some people call off-page SEO, all constitute a website's authority. The second pillar is content, both the depth of your website's content and the relevance of your content to the searcher's intent. And even how your content speaks to other information the searcher may not have even realized that they were looking for. Years ago, adding keywords to content was enough to rank in Google, but now Google looks for content depth, breadth, and topical authority when ranking web pages. It wants to rank websites that really think about what the user is looking for and that create original high quality content and have experience and expertise in their respective industries. For Google Business Profiles on Google Maps, this also includes the contents of your profile such as reviews, Q&As, posts, as well as the landing page linked to from your GBP.

The third pillar is technicals. This has to do with your website's meta tags, the internal linking profile of your website distributing your page rank, your HTML code, and things like that. Search engine bots crawl all of those backend elements of our websites and use them to understand what our content is about. The fourth and final pillar is UX or user behavior factors. That's what happens when people land on the page. How long do they spend on the website? Do they scroll, do they click? Do they go back to find other search results? What are they doing while they're on your page?

Every Google ranking factor can fit into one of these four pillars. It's that simple. Even as Google's algorithms have evolved and become more sophisticated over the years, they've always pointed to these four pillars as a north star. So although SEO is very complex and can be intimidating at times for beginners, it can be simplified in this way. Holistic SEO is the process of improving websites in those four core areas, and as long as you focus on those four pillars simultaneously, you're going to see your web traffic and organic visibility increase.

Mordy Oberstein:

Thank you so much, Manick. Make sure to follow him on social media links in the show notes. And it is, again, there's so many different ways you can define Holistic SEO. From a foundational fundamental way, those four pillars, those are definitely the four pillars that you want to focus on if you're getting started and trying to learn how to optimize web pages and websites. And it is interesting to see how as you grow that outlook of how you would define holistic SEO will probably change and adopt and become more sophisticated over time.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, totally. And I think that that's partially because Google's evolved over time and they'll keep changing as well. So I think that you have to pay attention to what the state of play is and how things are evolving across the board. And if you aren't keeping pace then you’ll fall behind. But I think that if your overall goal is to connect with users who are interested in what you do, then I think that you should be pretty rock solid. I think that folks who are connecting with their audience and whose focus is their audience will be able to weather... Whatever algorithmic updates, whatever technological updates there are, because at the core of it, your audience is what? Is your focus. And I think that that will help you leaps and bounds.

Mordy Oberstein:

And it's also Google's focus. They're going and looking at what users want and trying to steer it that way. Now, speaking of user satisfaction and now that you know all about holistic SEO and whatnot, what would happen if people, or as we as marketers call them, users, also known as my extended family, users. What would happen if these users started taking a more holistic approach to Google in how they'd run queries? Oh my, it would be interesting. Which means it's time to take a holistic and directional look and approach with a little segment we call Going Going Google. And it's going going, Google. It's out of here.

So I have this whole thing, I'm on a soap box. I am on a soap box. People do not want to be sold to the way that they used to be. In fact, they don't want to be sold to. That's the change. It used to be you could sell, it's okay. Now people are far less willing to be sold to. They don't want to feel like they're being sold to. There's a need for greater consumer autonomy and so forth and so forth and so forth. And that puts performance marketers in a little bit of a corner because if you're going to be overly focused on the conversion and pushing that conversion, you're out of tune just a bit I think with what users are looking for.

We talked about as a bit with Glenn Gabe about affiliate marketers taking the foot off the gas, and it's very similar to that. If users or people are going to be looking at a more autonomous approach to buying things and therefore searching things or consuming things and therefore searching things, I personally think it forces a little bit of a change in approach to how we optimize for those folks. So for example, in that particular case, being present at all of the various user touch points becomes much more important.

So for example, if someone says, "I'm going to buy a new microwave." As opposed to going, "Okay, I'll go to Google, I'll look at one or two things and I'll buy from one of those two options," I'm oversimplifying that. Sure, they'll do a lot more research, they'll run a lot more nuanced queries. And they may not click on your result, but they may see your result show up there for each one of their queries. And that's very telling to that user, "Oh, I keep seeing that website over... No matter what I'm searching for for microwaves, that website keeps popping up. That is so interesting."

And then eventually when they do run the query where they want to convert, they may see you there and click on you or they may say, "Let me check them out because they keep showing up for the microwaves." That's a different approach to what I would call a traditional SEO. It's a little bit more of an holistic SEO strategy approach to SEO because you're trying to align in that case with the user looking to convert based on the brand being top of mind. So you're less interested in ranking for the keyword and getting the conversion on that keyword, and you'd be more interested in this scenario in ranking for all of the keywords and having a brand presence for all of the keywords so that the user knows who the hell you are when they're ready to convert.

Crystal Carter:

I think the top-of-the-funnel stuff and the bottom-of-the-funnel stuff should have a different approach. So I think that when you're at the top of the funnel, if I'm thinking about buying a car, I bought a car like in the last year. And when I was thinking about that, there are brands that I know that I will not bother with because they're just not on my radar. I'm not a fan of them, of them as a brand. There's other brands that are like... They're on the short list. And in the top-of-the-funnel area, things like sponsorships and influencer engagement, lifestyle blogs of, "This is how I spend my time in my minivan, that sort of thing." And you'd be like, "Oh, okay, that's a cool minivan. They went on a road trip."

And I think that for that kind of content, you want it to be brand. You want brand vibes. You want people to be able to understand what your brand is about. You want people to understand the kind of emotive things that people will get from that brand. You want people to be entertained, engaged, educated. You want people to be able to... To educate them on what kinds of things might you need on a road trip, for instance. And that's just good information. If you're taking a family of four on a road trip, you will want information on how to do that without losing your mind, and that's something-

Mordy Oberstein:

Not possible, but, yeah, okay.

Crystal Carter:

And if it so happens that... I'm trying to think of a minivan van, like the Picasso. That's a van, isn't it? Or something. I don't know.

Mordy Oberstein:

That's seems very European. I don't know. The Ford Windstar to go back to our childhood.

Crystal Carter:

Right. Or like a VW van or whatever. I don't know. So you're trying to think of opening doors or sliding doors, which sliding doors are, ooh, very nice. Or how many cup holders need. Anyway, that's something that you can get from a educational, an engaging, entertaining, edutainment kind of piece of content. But thinking about holistically, you also need to think about when people get to the point where they're like, "I would like to buy this minivan." Don't waste their time. Okay. This is something that Amazon is very, very good at. By the time I get to the point where I'm like, "I would like to purchase this item," I want to see nuts and bolts things. I want to see is there a warranty? How many cup holders, how big is the door? How many doors are there? How many rearview mirrors? Does it have a rearview mirror defrosting?

If you're looking at clothes, I want to see the sizes and I want to see the size comparisons, and I want to see all of that sort of stuff. I want to see all of the details on that page. Don't waste my time with fluff on the page where I'm going to actually buy the thing. And I think that the way that we think about the funnel should be very distinct. And they should support each other. Still keep some of the stylized photos or whatever, that sort of thing, still give me the vibes, but I want the nuts and bolts stuff by the time I get down to the funnel.

So I think it's important to think about when you think about the holistic thing, make sure that you cover every stage that you need to cover, but do it at the right time. I don't need to necessarily see the sizing details when you're showing me the lifestyle stuff. I don't need that stuff at the top of the funnel. But when I get down to it, I do need to know. Because for some people, those are deal-breakers like, "Oh, they don't have the inseam that I need, just not going to buy those pants."

Mordy Oberstein:

I think what happens is now we're in an era where your consumer trust is at the forefront, especially on digital for so many different reasons, including the influx of AI content, looking for more human experience. The value of what you would traditionally call that brand content leading up to the performance content or the conversion content is there's such a greater overlap. It used to be, and I'm saying this anecdotally, I saw a product, I would investigate it, if I got to one of those pages where there was really great information about the product that would be enough to convince me, "Okay, buy." Now, I feel like I really want to know who you are, what you're all about, what's going on with you? Can I really trust you?

Imagine you're on some website and it turns out that that person is really not a great company. They've said a lot of horrible things, whatever it is, you would want to know now. Whereas back in the day, I feel like those questions didn't come up quite the same way with the quite amount of substance to them. So understanding who you are as a brand and what you are and what you represent and all the things about you, it's just more in focus and consumer trust is so much more important. And I think as an SEO or a performance marketer, it's really important to realize that you need that setup to get to those conversions more than ever, in my opinion.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah. I think that it's important to understand that that is definitely part of it that's even going to put you in the conversation. I don't think you want to be sold to necessarily. As you were saying, people don't necessarily want to be sold to. I think people want information to make intelligent choices. So this is the information that you need in order to make the decision as to whether you want to buy it. The branding piece should be like... It's more of a like, can you engage with us? Is this a product, is this a brand, is this a company, is this an idea that you want to engage with? And there'll be lots of signals that you can give to people to tell them that like, "Yeah, we can engage with you. We can understand you. We literally speak your language."

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, like, "We're alive, we're available, we're here. We're not going to run away." All the things.

Crystal Carter:

Right. So people, for instance, on social or something, somebody will post a video, post a picture or whatever, and people that... And accounts that are really well engaged with, for instance, the person, if you check the comments, the person who posted is commenting all the time. I was on YouTube the other day and I saw a short, and it was one of those little heartwarming ones, and I was like, "Aw, cute." And literally within a half an hour, the person who posted it was like, "Thanks." And I was like, "Oh, okay. I didn't think you'd reply to this at all." And I think that when you reply to your reviews, when you are creating content that's interesting that people are going to respond to, that's showing people that that's not selling the item, that's not even necessarily selling the brand, but it's demonstrating.

And I think going back to... You talked about liberal arts, going back to my liberal arts college degree, shout out Kenyon College.

Mordy Oberstein:

Very holistic.

Crystal Carter:

Right. Going back to that... Totally holistic, actually.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, that's the whole point of it.

Crystal Carter:

So going back to that, and one of the things that was really not necessarily drilled into us, but one of the things that we came up a lot was show, don't tell. Show, don't tell. And I've taken that to heart so much. I could tell you how great the microwave is a million times, but if I show you that I can make really good mac and cheese, or I can make this great stuff in it or that it cleans up really easily after I splattered mac and cheese all over the inside of the microwave or whatever it may be, or that it makes a great sound when it goes ping or that I can also use it as... If I can show you, that's completely different from if I tell you. If I show you, then you again can also see and make the decision.

So I show you what I can do and you can make your decisions as to whether or not you think that's good or bad or whatever with your own intelligence... And that I think is really important. Show, don't tell.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah. This is why we show you who's great for the SEO news by not just telling you, "Oh, Barry's great for the SEO news," but showing you with our new series It's New where you can... Yeah, show, don't tell. Or both, tell and show. Show and tell. That's why- Show and tell, which is just telling you it's time for this week's Snappy News.

Snappy News, Snappy News, Snappy News. So much news this week because Google ran their Google I/O event for 2024, which means all sorts of innovation in AI. Gemini, Gemini, Gemini, and Gemini and more Gemini. But there are some things that relate to Search, per Barry Schwartz from Search Engine Land. New Google Search AI features to help you plan, research, and learn. So Google did make some big announcements related to Search itself. The biggest one being that the SGE, now known as AI Overviews, will be going live in the US and other countries around the world. What does that mean for rankings? Well, we talked about that on a special episode of this episode podcast specifically about the implications of Google I/O. Look forward in the show notes of this podcast or on the Wix SEO Learning Hub. Crystal and I went extensively through it.

In a nutshell, no, this is not the end of content as we know it. I still think people will click and try to explore topics in greater depth that the AI Overview can't do fundamentally. It does mean that Google needs to provide citations properly to help facilitate that. I think we are going to see that. I think there are some issues with it as it is now just a bit, but I think it will evolve, and I think Google does realize that there is a need for exploration. Part of what makes me think that is Google has what Barry has termed AI organized search results, and what it's doing there is it's not offering an AI Overview per se. What it's offering is a breakdown of the topic, a custom structured SERP based on an AI output.

So in the example that Google gave, there was something around was searching for a place to go for your 20th anniversary, blah-blah-blah-blah-blah, and it breaks down the results according to, I don't know, romantic places to go, steak houses, places with patios or rooftop restaurants. It just breaks down the SERP and organizes the information way differently. We actually spoke about that, little pat on my back to myself, during the episode we spoke to Danny Goodwin from Search Engine Land about Google's Gemini release. And I said, "They're going to take the custom output format results that they announced with Gemini and bring that to the SERP." This is that, I believe.

So you do see a balance between Google offering the AI Overview and using the AI Overview to offer an exploration of the actual results that are possible to show on the SERP. So I do think there will be a balance. I don't think it's the end of content. I do think, a little bit of a hot take, it might be the end of super top level content that everyone's done before a gazillion times over. But again, check out the episode that Crystal and I did. There were a whole bunch of other parts of the announcement. For example, Google announced multistep reasoning capabilities. So let's say you search find the best yoga or whatever studio in 50 mile radius of where I am right now with pizza place next door and a half hour walk from so-and-so place, and Google breaks down the results by telling you the walking time between the two places, and it gives you maps you can see between the various places. So it's multistep reasoning.

I'll be honest with you. It feels that Google has announced multistep reasoning with other names before or has talked about this before and just didn't call it multistep reasoning, things around MUM and so forth. But okay, that's an official announcement that Google made at Google I/O that related to Search. There's planning capabilities, which we've talked about on this new section before. So if we search for plan me a three-day trip in Philadelphia, the AI Overview will produce an itinerary for you. Or now we're talking about create a three-day meal plan for me that's easy to prepare and it'll prepare a meal plan for you.

Again, my personal take is that it'll be helpful if I was spending one day in Philadelphia, I wasn't even expecting to be there, I got a couple hours to kill, plan me a day. If I'm dropping 20 grand to fly my family around the world to Paris or whatever it is, I'm not asking the AI Overview to plan out a whole itinerary for me. Maybe I'll get started with the AI, but I would definitely investigate myself there. The same thing with a meal plan. If I'm a casual dieter, make me a meal plan that's low-carb whatever. If I have a real dietary restrictions and needs, I'm going to do the actual research myself. The AI Overview might be a good place to start, but certainly not finish. So again, I don't think it's the end of content. I do think it'll help perhaps refine the targeting of how we think about who we're writing for and what we're writing about just a bit. And there might be some, I'll call it, constriction of the web because of that. And yes, that might hurt a bunch of websites. I'm not saying no.

With that, Google also is rolling out a web filter. So again, for Barry Schwartz from Search Engine Land, "Google adds a web filter to only show text-based links in Google Search results. So it's a tab at the top of the SERP, or if you click on the More section, you'll see there the More on the menu section above the actual search results, and it'll say web and all you'll get are the 10 blue links," quote-unquote. By the way, friend of the show, friend of a lot of things, friend of everybody, because this is a great guy overall, Andrew Optimisey, he has a Chrome extension where you can automatically default to that web tab. A link to it in the show notes if that's your thing, then check out Andrew's helpful Chrome extension that he has for you there.

Lastly, from Barry Schwartz again, but this time from Search Engine Roundtable. Remove Your Content from Google's AI Overviews. This came from Glenn Gabe who actually linked to both Barry's article and to Glenn's original article that goes into in greater depth in the show notes. But Glenn showed how if you want to take your content out of the AI Overview, you can with the no snippet robots meta tag. If you're using Wix by the way, you can have easy access to the robots meta tag controls in the SEO panel. Just click on no snippet and you're done. Glenn tested it. He said after a few hours he saw that the AI Overview no longer contained a link to his results and the actual overview itself changed because they removed his content altogether from it. So the no snippet does seem to work.

I will say, caution. Lots of people are talking about, "Oh, get me out of here. I didn't know. Google never asked me if I wanted to be in their AI Overview." If you are not there, your competitor will be. So unless you have a very good reason for doing this, I don't recommend you do it. Yes, it might be angering. You might feel like Google's taking away your traffic and so forth and so forth, but don't let your anger blind you because you might actually get clicks if your card shows up in the AI Overview. You definitely will not get clicks if your card doesn't because you added the no snippet robots meta tag. So caution, word to the wise I guess. And that is this week's snappy news.

Barry, by the way, is really good at replying to comments.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, he is, actually agree.

Mordy Oberstein:

I don't mean it's like a simple thing like, "Oh, Barry's good at replying to comments." I didn't mean it like that. It's nice that he takes the time to reply to comments.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, he's got like 200,000 followers on Twitter, but when people attack him and he's like, "Yeah, cool, thanks."

Mordy Oberstein:

Everywhere, YouTube.

Crystal Carter:

It's really good. And also he shouts out when people are like, "Hey, I saw this thing." He's like, "Oh yeah, so-and-so saw this thing and it's really good."

Mordy Oberstein:

Yep. Many of SEOs, including myself, owe a lot to Barry for their careers. I also owe a lot to some great information I've read throughout the years, our follow of the week, the one, the only, the absolutely brilliant Dawn Anderson.

Crystal Carter:

Shout out to Dawn Anderson. Dawn Anderson is like hashtag goals in terms of SEO SEO fantasticness, I think she's a great follow for holistic SEO because she approaches it from a really holistic perspective. Not only is she super smart in terms of lots of technical things, but she studies not just SEO, but she also studies information retrieval. But yeah, I've spoken to her and she's saying like, "I study information retrieval. I go to information retrieval conferences." She's not just thinking about necessarily SEO, exactly what's going on with Google, she's thinking about the whole of how information is disseminated across the web, and that is super, super fantastic. And it's a really, really interesting way to approach it because I think sometimes that can put you ahead of the curve in terms of understanding where Search is going and understanding how information will flow through.

Also, Dawn is incredibly nice and lovely. Yeah, the last time I saw her was at the UK Search Awards, and she was easily the best dressed. Super smart and yeah, do follow her.

Mordy Oberstein:

Honestly, some of the best articles I've ever read in SEO come from Dawn. You go to Search Engine Land and type in her name and you'll find a collection of really... Just take a cup of tea, cup of coffee, have a beer, sit down with it kind of thing. So definitely give Dawn a follow, a link to her LinkedIn profile in the show notes. The connection's there, it was quite holistic.

Crystal Carter:

I think we covered everything.

Mordy Oberstein:

It's the whole picture, all of it. A whole loaf of bread. One sitting on the street corner. Me and a couple of drunk hanging out. They're drinking the beer, I’m in the middle of a bread.

Crystal Carter:

It's all wheat, I suppose.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, I guess, yeah. Makes sense. Just one giant carb fest.

Crystal Carter:

Yay.

Mordy Oberstein:

That's why we're doing it. So good. I highly recommend just eat plain bread. Get like, a good loaf of bread. Oh, delicious.

Crystal Carter:

What about with Marmite? I had some bread with Marmite today. It was delicious.

Mordy Oberstein:

I have a bottle here, on site. "What do I have to do with this thing?"

Crystal Carter:

You can give it to me-

Mordy Oberstein:

Some of you don't know someone gave me some Marmite to try and I know some people like this stuff. It's not even food.

Crystal Carter:

It's delicious. It's full of B vitamins.

Mordy Oberstein:

It's yeast-smelling glue.

Crystal Carter:

It's full of B vitamins. It's very umami. That's what it is.

Mordy Oberstein:

If I want some B vitamins, I'll take a B vitamin.

Crystal Carter:

To each their own, I suppose.

Mordy Oberstein:

Well, yeah, it's subjective, but it's also objective. Anyway, thanks for listening to the SERP's US podcast. Are you going to miss us? Not to worry, we're back next week with a new episode as we dive into SEO as a team sport live from brightonSEO UK. Look forward ever you consume your podcast or on our SEO Learning app at wix.com/SEO/learn. Looking to learn more? Let me try that again. Looking to learn more about SEO? Check out all the great content and webinars and resources on the Wix SEO Learning App at, you guessed it, wix.com/SEO/learn. Don't forget to give us review on iTunes or a rating on Spotify. Until next time, peace, love, and SEO.